The present invention relates generally to medical imaging, and more particularly to determining optimal operating parameters for medical imaging.
Medical imaging is a crucial tool to support diagnoses and is widely accepted in clinical applications. To generate clinically acceptable images, a number of scanner, patient, and examination parameters need to be set before an exam or procedure is performed. For example, in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) knee exams, repetition time (TR), echo time (TE), and other parameters need to be determined prior to the exam. In current clinical practice, these parameters are manually adjusted by a technician or operator based on their experience and individual choice. However, the number of possible values for these parameters is large and includes values or combinations of values that deliver poor quality images. Adjusting these combinations of parameters to generate clinically acceptable images is prohibitive with logical evaluation because of the large number of possible combinations. Moreover, with the variety of equipment in a facility, or after changes to a system such as software or hardware upgrades, the burden of changing the practices to state-of-the-art are cumbersome at best and inefficient due to their manual nature.